Nina’s sister Pam arrived yesterday for a couple of weeks. She’s been "impacted" by Harmony Kingdom’s inability to pay attention to their customer base and has been reduced to a part-time employee. So she’s taking a couple of weeks’ vacation with us here in Colorado. It’s fun to have her here. Nina and Pam have been working on family history almost nonstop since she arrived. On Thursday is the BIG DAY! Nina and Pam will be sealed to their parents at 4 p.m. in the Denver Temple. Heather is driving over to participate as well. It’ll be a great day in the temple!

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I was sitting in my cubical in Milpitas. I decided I should document that cubical! Because I’m a Director, I should have a director-sized cubical but since I’m not in California all that often, I have a manager-sized cube. Also, since I’m not there all that much, it serves as a kind of a meeting place and has a small fridge for keeping sodas and water cool for my team out there. I make up for not having a Director-sized cubical in Milpitas by having a hard-walled office in Colorado Springs.

It’s interesting to me how often we move people around in California. Cubicals make it much easier to move people and rearrange things. I’ve the opinion that people often get moved just because it’s so easy to move them to a new location. Hard-walled offices don’t move nearly so often. I think that in a normal year about 20% of the cubicals get rearranged and people get moved. That’s a lot of money and wasted time. When someone gets moved, they loose at least three days of work. One to pack up, one to move, one to unpack. It’s often much more than three days. Cubicles themselves are fairly inexpensive, until an occupant has special needs such as repetitive stress injuries or other handicaps. Hard-walled offices are much easier to adapt than cubicles, which were meant to have no variations!

From the outside, cubicals are equally nondescript. This is cubical row where my office in Milpitas is located. Just for the record, my cube is the first one on the left. It’s in the center of the building, far from any windows. In this same row are a group of people who work for me. A few months ago they moved out of this area over by some windows in a kind of a power play. The cubes over there were empty. In fact, much of this part of the building consisted of empty cubicles, remnants of the downsizing that had been going on. Further, this particular building was the most expensive building in our campus in Milpitas, making it less interesting for folks to take up residence there. Some changes were made to the way that Facilities charges for space and whole bunches of IT folks were moved into the building from other locations around Milpitas. In that move, my folks were sent back to their original location, well away from the windows and the natural light.

I’d like to figure out how to have a large office building with lots of windows and light around where people are working. People just do better when their light is something other than florescent lighting, no matter how much green-filtering is put into the light fixtures to make the light more "natural." People want to see what’s happening outside, even if nothing is happening. I always keep curtains open in hotel rooms, for instance, as long as it’s daylight.

Speaking of California, the recall election is finished, the current governor Grey Davis has been recalled, and Arnold Swarzenegger has been elected to replace him. The changeover hasn’t happened, yet, and all kinds of backoffice things are happening as lame-duck-governor Davis is ending his term in office. It’ll be interesting to see in the future whether or not this change makes any difference.

Yesterday was election day here in Colorado. Voter turnout was low — about 26% — but those that voted were pretty emphatic with their votes. Every state money issue was soundly defeated. The stupid proposal to put slot machines into race tracks was soundly defeated. The incumbent school board members were voted out and replaced by a group that sounds interested in bringing some educational reform into District 11 schools. That would certainly be a breath of fresh air. I can’t imagine how our schools could get much worse than they are.

So, we’re headed to the temple tomorrow to seal a family together. It’ll be a great day. Welcome to Colorado, Pam!